Reflections on America I

Jacques Maritain

Though for a long time I have wished to speak
about this country and give expression to my
admiration for it, it was not without much
hesitation that I chose the topic of these talks.

First, because when you live a long time in a
country you get more and more information about
it; and the more information you get, the more
confused you become, information blurring more or
less your personal experience and disclosing the
infinite complexity and ceaselessly contrasting
aspects of so vast a human reality.

Secondly, because my philosophical work prevented
me from undertaking any systematic, complete and
supposedly "scientific" study of this matter.

Yet, on the one hand, I felt a growing inner urge
to bear witness to this country and to its people
it is a matter of justice and of gratitude for me.
And in this respect I am only playing my small
part in a French tradition which began with
Chateaubriand and Tocqueville.

On the other hand, I came to realize that however
helpful and necessary systematic surveys and
scientific analyses may be, as, for instance,
Gunnar Myrdal's book, An American Dilemma, on the
condition of the colored people, there is room,
nevertheless, for quite a different approach, a
merely personal, experiential, non-scientific
approach, which has a good chance of being as
true, in its own way, as the scientific and
objective one, and even of disclosing deeper,
though less firmly established, truths.

For in the last analysis, our appreciation of a
country or a people has to do with the knowledge
of the individual, of the singular, of that
immense collective personality which is a people
with its history, its mores, its common psyche,
its dreams, its vocation. And most important in
the knowledge of the singular is what cannot be
demonstrated, and depends on a kind of experience
and perception so rooted in individual instances,
in person to person relationships, that the
statements in which it is expressed cannot be
explained or proved by universal notions and
rational disquisition.

The fact remains that in trying to express my
reflections on the American scene, my position
will be quite vulnerable: precisely because my
statements will be susceptible of no
demonstration. Moreover, they will claim to
constitute neither an historical analysis nor any
kind of complete picture, nor any kind of
"explanation." They will leave aside many
important questions for the discussion of which my
impromptu way of speaking was not suitable. They
will be incomplete, subjective, disconnected --
random reflections. Moreover, in such matters
there is always a certain margin of error
regarding the bearing of our observations,
accurate as they may be.

But, for all that, I am confident that there are
true insights at the core of my random
reflections. Furthermore, the truths they contain
are most valuable for me, for they are in essence
a statement of why I love America, that America
which I have known for almost a quarter of a
century. I am aware of the fact that every great
human reality is ambivalent, and that the best
things involve dangers or are accompanied by more
or less serious defects.

I am aware, too, of the severity with which
Americans, and the best among them, criticize
certain aspects of their own culture and nation. I
shall have some opportunities to point out,
myself, several of those unfavorable aspects. What
matters to me is that they are of small import in
comparison with all that I love in this country,
all that which makes it crucially important for
the hopes of mankind and the future of
civilization.

These preliminary remarks were destined to make
clear the nature and purpose of the seminar out of
which grew this book. In particular they make
clear, I hope, why I have tried to cling to my own
personal experience, and to forget the books, the
very good books, which I have read on the matter,
such as Tocqueville's, André Siegfried's, Gilbert
Chinard's La Doctrine de l'Américanisme, Waldo
Frank's The New Discovery of America, John Nef's
The United States and Civilization, Elinor Nef's
Letters and Notes, Yves Simon's La Civilisation
Américaine, and also those which I have on my desk
but have not yet read, such as Jacques Barzun's
God's Country and Mine, and Max Lerner's
America as a Civilization.

I think that as a rule first impressions are
particularly valuable. Of course they contain an
element of chance. They may be wrong. Georges
Duhamel, for instance, had bad luck -- he could not
forgive America for the thermometer that an
Immigration doctor forcibly put into his mouth
upon his arrival on these shores. But leaving
aside accidental interferences and assuming that
the traveller is sufficiently open-minded, his
first impressions about a new country may be
superficial and oversimplified -- they are, for all
that, generally revealing, loaded with significant
insight.

With respect to this country, a more particular
remark may be added. There are many foreign
travellers who are not biased -- who even are good
and clear-sighted observers, capable of sound,
cool practical judgment. They appreciate America,
and they like her. They weigh the pros and cons,
and they conclude by admiring this country a great
deal, with some suitable restraint, to be sure, a
certain number of prudent qualifications, and
sometimes, in addition, some good and more or less
patronizing advice.

And, there are other foreign travellers who are
struck right away with what we call in French le
coup de foudre, love at first sight. Love at first
sight does not deal with an object, but with a
person. For those whom it strikes it is like a
sudden illumination into a deep-rooted secret.
They have been initiated.

This is so true that a friend of mine -- a great
French scholar -- who underwent, as I did, this kind
of experience, likes to think of the Frenchmen who
got in this way, at one stroke, some inner
understanding of this country, as constituting a
group of privileged people, a sort of club, in
which each one is on brotherly terms with the
others by reason of the common understanding in
question.

Now the very fact of which I am speaking -- love at
first sight -- has its own significance. I would say
that it takes place more frequently with respect
to France and America than with respect to any
other country. Contrary to Pascal's saying, we
don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes
by reason of their defects as well as of their
qualities. When he who, meeting for the first time
either France or America, falls in love at first
sight, it is because he is confronted with a moral
personality, a moral vocation, something of
invaluable dignity, which is spiritual in nature,
and which, I think, in the last analysis is
quickened, in one way or another, by some spark of
the Christian spirit and legacy.

*

What was, then, my own first impression?

It was quite definite, though difficult to express
in words. I felt I was obscurely confronted with a
deep-seated contrast of immense bearing, a sharp,
far-reaching contrast between the people on the
one hand, and, on the other hand, what I would
like to call the externally superimposed
structure or ritual of civilization.

What I call the structure or ritual of civilization
was the industrial civilization, born in Europe and
arrived here from abroad, which I saw in this first
insight as hanging over a people of pioneers and
free men under God. This industrial civilization,
which I had learned to know in Europe, appeared to
me, here, both as gigantically developed (like
many things transplanted from Europe over here)
and as a kind of ritual dedicated to some foreign
goddess. Its inner logic, as I knew it -- originally
grounded as it was on the principle of the
fecundity of money and the absolute primacy of
individual profit -- was, everywhere in the world,
inhuman and materialist.

But, by a strange paradox, the people who lived
and toiled under this structure or ritual of
civilization were keeping their own souls apart
from it. At least as regards the essentials, their
souls and vital energy, their dreams, their
everyday effort, their idealism and generosity,
were running against the grain of the inner logic
of the superimposed structure. They were freedom-loving
and mankind-loving people, people clinging
to the importance of ethical standards, anxious to
save the world, the most humane and the least
materialist among modern peoples which had reached
the industrial stage.

Thus the basic thing in my first impression was
the sharp distinction to be made between the
spirit of the American people and the logic of the
superimposed structure or ritual of civilization:
and not only the distinction, but the state of
tension, of hidden conflict, between this spirit
of the people and this logic of the structure; the
steady, latent rebellion of the spirit of the
people against the logic of the structure.

Then a telling question arose: what will be the
result of the conflict between the spirit of the
people and the logic of the structure? This was
the second basic element of my first impression.
Of course, this first impression made things a
little too simplified, too dramatized. But I think
it was fundamentally true. And, as a matter of
fact, I came over for the first time in 1933, at
the time, it seems to me, of a drastic turning
point in the very drama which had begun years ago
with Theodore Roosevelt.

And the more I lived in this country, the more I
realized that the answer to the question I just
mentioned was: the spirit of the people is
gradually overcoming and breaking the logic of
the structure.

In other words, the vital, pragmatic, completely
unsystematic pressure exercised by the American
people and the American soul on the structures of
our modern industrial civilization is transforming
from within the inner dynamism and historical
trends of the industrial regime. It is causing
this regime to pass beyond capitalism. The people
have thus vanquished the inner logic of the
industrial regime considered in its first
historical phase, and have, almost without knowing
it, inaugurated a really new phase in modern
civilization. I only mention this point now. I
will discuss it at greater length in a further
chapter.

The title of this chapter represents another
aspect of my first impressions. During my first
visit to New York I was invaded by a kind of
thrilling enthusiasm and pleasure in the sudden
feeling that here we are freed from history. For a
European long immersed in all the rotten stuff of
past events, past hatreds, past habits, past
glories and past diseases which compose a sort of
overwhelming historical heredity, the first
contact with America is thus liable to produce a
sort of intoxication, a delight in a new-born
freedom, as if the old burden of historical
necessities were suddenly put aside. It seemed
that everything is possible to human freedom.

Of course, this sentiment that one is freed from
history is a great illusion. We are never freed
from history. But the illusion points, I think, to
a very significant fact: this country is entirely
turned toward the future, not toward the past. An
appeal of this kind, a suction so to speak,
exercised by the future upon the whole nation to
such a degree and with such power, is in my
opinion something new in human history, and is no
doubt an element of the greatness of America.

You are not freed from your own history. On the
contrary, you are deeply attached to it, even to
the point of cherishing pieces of colonial
furniture, and of artificially maintaining at
great cost villages equipped and functioning as in
the eighteenth century. But in one sense you are
freed from the history of your European ancestors,
for you have voluntarily cut off your links with
this history. You depend, as does every Western
man, on the history of Europe. But this history is
your pre-history.

And your own history as a people, as a nation, is
quite recent. It is barely two hundred years old.
You have not had time for hardening, for
sclerosis. And the voice of your Founding Fathers
still appeals to your emotions in a lively manner
(I would say that for the average Frenchman the
Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme is an old piece
of parchment, but for you the Declaration of
Independence seems to have been written some fifty
years ago).

In this sense -- and in this sense only -- the American
people are young. On the one hand, they enjoy that
bloom, that openness to the future, which
Aristotle called the flower of youth. On the other
hand, there is in them a certain lack of that
collective, common experience as a nation, which
is an advantage, sometimes dearly paid for, of the
Old World.

With respect to the illusory but telling sentiment
of being freed from history, I would like to
submit another remark -- relating to the root
incompatibility which exists between the American
people and Marxist philosophy. For Marx, history
is, as you know, an immense and terrible set of
concatenated necessities, in the bosom of which
man slaves toward his final emancipation. When he
becomes at last, through communism, master of his
own history, then he will drive the chariot of
Juggernaut which had previously crushed him. But
for the American people it is quite another story.
They are not interested in driving the chariot of
Juggernaut. They have gotten rid of Juggernaut. It
is not in any future messianic freedom of mankind,
nor in mastering the necessities of history, it is
in man's present freedom that they are interested.
And as Diogenes proved movement, so they prove
this freedom in walking. History is, in one sense,
behind them. They walk, they march, they gambol
ahead of history, as in those big processions with
resounding bands and girls in fancy dress, which
so often enliven American streets.

I have spoken of my first impressions on arriving
in this country. Since that time I have come to
realize more and more the immensity of the human
effort which was brought into play to create a new
world within the course of two centuries, to give
to half a continent a material and moral equipment
fit to free men and to build a civilization really
and genuinely original in character, capable of
astonishing, captivating and seducing the hearts
of men.

And I have more and more admired both the creative
work which was thus accomplished and the process
of self-creation through which it unceasingly
continues.

I have already said that the American people are
the least materialist among the modern peoples
which have attained the industrial stage. As I put
it in a parting talk [2]
before leaving for Rome
in 1945, "ce pays n'est pas un pays matérialiste
comme le disent trop volontiers certains
Américains eux-mêmes, il se fraye a force de
courage un chemin difficile où la liberté de
l'homme doit soulever le poids de matérialisme que
la civilisation moderne, avec sa tendance à la
technocratic et à l'hégémonie de l'argent, fait
partout peser sur la personne humaine." I would
like to insist on this point, because few things,
to my mind, are as sickening as the stock remarks
with which so many persons in Europe, who are
themselves far from despising the earthly goods of
this world, reproach this country with its so-called
materialism. The power of this fable is so
great that sometimes you yourselves are taken in
by it. I remember some American ladies in New York
who said to me, with a disillusioned (perhaps
slightly treacherous) wink: "We are a materialist
nation, aren't we?" Well, all this talk about
American materialism is no more than a curtain of
silly gossip and slander.

In a number of my fellow Europeans the fable in
question proceeds from an old prejudice, confusing
spirituality with an aristocratic contempt for any
improvement in material life (especially the
material life of others). In other cases the fable
of American materialism (seemingly corroborated,
as it is, by some of your exports, like average
Hollywood productions) appears as a kind of
compensation for the frustrations Europe has
endured, and a kind of solace for the agony which
the fact of owing gratitude to another imposes on
human nature. And in other cases, it results,
contrariwise, from too great an expectation, from
the fact that Europeans expect from you an
understanding which they fail sometimes to obtain.

*

I have no intention of denying that in America as
in all other places in the world, especially among
industrialized nations, large areas in the common
consciousness -- the most obvious, as a rule, and the
most superficial areas -- have been infected by the
miasmata that emanate from the structures and
ritual of our modern civilization; the noise made
by a crowd of vulgar assertions, which measure
everything either in terms of statistics and facts
and figures or in terms of success, fun, and
practical power, hold "ideas" to be only something
to be "sold" to a possible consumer, silent
partner, or sucker, and see human conduct as a
by-product either of hormones or of economic
factors -- this noise is too great not to be heard.

The observer may be misled, it is true, especially
when it comes to the answers given by people about
their personal aims in life, or about their
political choices, by the appearances and
facilities of language, I mean by the fact that as
a rule, in our everyday life, we use words in a
way which will save our brain cells as much work
as possible -- and it is much easier and less
expensive, in this respect, to have recourse to
mean rather than to lofty platitudes. Yet the
universal diffusion of a kind of popularized,
anonymous positivistic philosophy, to which
pragmatist dynamism, in this country, gave higher
intellectual standing and additional pep, can only
make more real and more insidious the process of
materialist contagion of which I am speaking.

I don't deny these things; I do say that to invoke
them as a proof of so-called American materialism
is to talk nonsense. For, in the first place, they
are in no way specifically American; exactly the
same symptoms, in relation to similar sociological
or psychological areas, leap to the eye everywhere
(especially in Europe) where the industrial regime
and its congenial ideological fumes are prevalent;
only the vocal expression seems perhaps to be a
little cruder and more naive here, whereas
elsewhere it is either more cautious and
sophisticated or more elaborately cynical. And,
in the second place, there are here plenty of
other, utterly opposing trends and
characteristics, which relate to much deeper and
more significant strata in the common psyche, and
which are typically American, and give the lie to
the fable of American materialism.

*

Well, I would like to ask the European critics of
this country what are in their eyes the criteria
of materialism. Are perhaps generosity and good
will the signs of a materialistic cast of mind?
Speaking not of such or such an individual, of
course, but of the general cast of mind and the
collective trends and customs of the people, what
I know is that the basic characteristics of the
American people are generosity, good will, the
sense of human fellowship.

There are, of course, egoistic individuals in
America as everywhere, but America is not egoist;
for the common consciousness of America, egoism is
shameful. There are greedy individuals in America
as there are everywhere, but there is no avarice
in the American cast of mind. The American people
are neither squeamish nor hypocritical about the
importance of money in the modern world. Even
their frank admission of this importance makes
Europeans uncomfortable. For the average European
cares about money as well as the average American,
but he tries to conceal the fact, for he has been
accustomed to associating money with avarice.

Here, on the contrary, money is cared for openly,
because money is considered a means, and must not
be kept but rather spent -- for improving one's own
life, to be sure, and one's freedom of action, but
also, and this is fundamental, for improving the
lives and freedom of others.

Americans like to give. Of course, there is the
exemption from taxes for gifts directed to the
common welfare; but this very law about taxes
would not have been possible if the astute
legislator did not know that as a rule the
American people are aware of the fact that it is
better to give than to receive. Not only the great
foundations,[3]
but the ordinary course of
activity of American institutions and the
innumerable American private groups show us that
the ancient Greek and Roman idea of the civis
praeclarus, the dedicated citizen who spends his
money in the service of the common good, plays an
essential part in American consciousness. And let
me observe that more often than not the gifts in
question are made for the sake of education and
knowledge. Frequently people who were unable to
have a college education make large gifts to
universities.

There is no materialism, I think, in the
astonishing, countless initiatives of fraternal
help which are the daily bread of the American
people, or in the profound feeling of obligation
toward others which exists in them, especially
toward any people abroad who are in distress.

I shall never forget the work of the rescue
committees for European scholars which I witnessed
during the war, and all those luncheons which
crowds of people eagerly attended in order to have
an eloquent auctioneer, at dessert time, extract
big checks from their pockets. I shall never
forget the admirable devotion with which Alvin
Johnson, then President of the New School for
Social Research, pursued this work of rescue, nor
the fraternal cooperation he extended to our
French-speaking École Libre des Hautes
Études when it was created with the help and
on the premises of the New School.

There is no materialism in the fact that the
American charities, drawing money from every
purse, and notably to assist people abroad, run
every year into such enormous sums that charity
ranks among the largest American industries, the
second or third in size, according to
statisticians.

Yes, yes, I know, the very fact involves a certain
danger that charity itself will become
industrialized, or overorganized. Well, people who
sit on their money like brooding hens are certain
to avoid that danger! And if the collection of
money for the needy and the helpless is so well
organized here that in giving our contribution
automatically each year, we may be tempted to
think that we are excused from ever giving our
heart (but can we believe that European streets
are jammed with people busy giving their hearts?),
let us not forget what an immense amount of
personal attention to one's neighbor and what
personal effort is unceasingly put forth in all
the groups which exist in this country, and which
spring up every day, to meet some particular human
misfortune or some particular social
maladjustment.

*

I would like to mention now other characteristics
of American life, namely, the extraordinary
resilience and versatility with which the American
people face new problems and adjust themselves to
new situations. They don't like to accept things
as they are, and to let people shift for
themselves by dint of suffering and ingenuity.
They prefer to change things and situations. They
prefer to find a new arrangement, new equipment, a
new gadget, a new line of social activity, for the
sake of the human individuals involved. Now, did
not Hegel speak of the "infinite elasticity" of
the spirit? Such resilience is a sign of a
perpetual alertness of the spirit acting as a
ferment in the mass.

Let us say, and this seems quite typical to me,
that in the immense population of America there is
no stagnation. As a result, I don't see America as
a mainland, but as a sea, a big ocean. Sometimes a
storm arises, a formidable current develops, and
it seems it will engulf everything. Wait a moment,
another current will appear and bring the first
one to naught. A great country, with as many
windshifts as the sea.[4]

At the origin of this fluidity there is the
activity of the mind at work in the people, in the
humble ways of daily life.

Many other aspects might be stressed. First, I
shall point out the concern of the American people
for moral and religious values, their attitude
toward moral conscience. I do not say that they
always act according to the dictates of conscience
-- what nation does? I say that they feel
miserable, they endure terrible discomfort when
they have a guilty conscience. The very fact alone
of nursing a doubt as to whether their conduct was
or was not ethically irreproachable causes them
pain. The result is sometimes unexpected, as the
Wave of fondness for the Japanese people which
developed after Hiroshima. Let us say that hiring
the devil for help will never be agreeable even to
your politicians. The common consciousness of this
country loathes cynicism, cannot be cynical. A
second aspect is the fundamental part played in
this country by free discussion, involving that
right to dissent without which there is no
community of free men, and which no historical
circumstance can impair here for long. There is a
perpetual process of self-examination and self-
criticism going on everywhere and in every sphere
of American life: a phenomenon incomprehensible
without a quest for truth of which a materialist
cast of mind is incapable.

A third aspect is the great battle which is being
fought in the educational field to develop the
humanities,[5]
the liberal arts, philosophy, and to
make wisdom the final aim, a battle of which the
members of the Committee on Social Thought are
especially aware. It is in this so-called
materialist country that professors of classics,
each in his own great or small college, struggle
with unequalled devotion to maintain the
intellectual tradition with which they are
entrusted; that a strenuous effort is being made
by the universities, and by technological
institutes as well, to overcome the dangers of
overspecialization and the trends toward
technocracy which are natural to industrial
civilization; and that a reformer of such stature
as Robert M. Hutchins has raised his bitter
criticisms and insisted on the necessity for
intellectual integration -- inspiring or prodding in
actual fact the vast academic effort of which I
just spoke, though naturally his name is too well
known to the public ever to be mentioned on
campuses.

A fourth aspect is the thirst, the eagerness for
knowledge -- not only with a view to its practical
applications, but first of all as a vital
necessity for the mind -- which I have had the
opportunity to observe, year after year, in
American youth everywhere in the country. Such a
thirst exists in the people as a whole, in
uneducated as in educated persons. Here as
elsewhere it is not created by education and
teachers (sometimes they seem rather anxious to
kill it). It is a need of nature, particularly
fresh, huge and intense in the American people.

A fifth aspect is the thirst for spiritual life
which is deep in the American soul, and the signs
of which are more and more manifest, especially
among young people. In a number of people it is
more or less unconscious, more or less repressed
by the conditions of existence and the tyranny of
unceasing activity. For all that it is real and
alive, and exercises continual pressure on souls.

For many years I was aware of this fact; I am
particularly pleased to have laid stress on it at
a time when such views seemed more than
paradoxical, and my Carthusian friends in Europe
told me that the very idea of ever having a
Charterhouse in America was completely ridiculous.

In a lecture on Action and Contemplation written
some twenty years ago,[6]
I insisted that there were in America great reserves
and possibilities for contemplation; the activism
which is to the fore appears, I said, in many
cases as a remedy against despair, and masks a
hidden aspiration to contemplation. I saw in the
American inclination to be moved by large
idealistic feelings an effect of this hidden
aspiration. And I concluded: "The cult of action
is not specifically American. It is a European
idea, an idea of post-Renaissance and
post-Reformation Europe. What may mislead us in
this matter, so it seems to me, is that the New
Continent, with terrible loyalty, has taken some
of the Old World's ideas, transplanted into virgin
soil, and carried them to their limits.
When in America some few come to realize better
the value of contemplative activity, its
superiority and fecundity, I believe the
possibilities I have spoken of will manifest
themselves, at least in a small way, but
forcefully enough gradually to modify the general
scheme of values."

Well, now Tom Merton's books are best-sellers,
great classical works on spiritual life are
published in abundance and are widely read in the
most varied circles, the Trapp of Gethsemani alone
has more novices than all European Trapps
combined, and is obliged to multiply new
foundations; the monasteries founded by various
contemplative Orders are so crowded that they
refuse candidates for lack of room; and there is a
Charterhouse in this country.

*

I have pointed out a certain number of aspects of
American life which seem to me to be typical. I
could continue in the same vein. There is no end
to the enumeration of the various features
peculiar, quite peculiar indeed, to so-called
American materialism.

Let me only add that from Moby Dick and
The Scarlet Letter to Look Homeward,
Angel and Requiem for a Nun -- from
Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson to Hart Crane,
Allen Tate and T. S. Eliot (who has remained an
American in spite of himself) -- American
literature, in its most objectively careful
scrutinies, has been preoccupied with the beyond
and the nameless which haunt our blood. Man, as it
sees him, is a restless being gropingly, sometimes
miserably, at grips with his fleshly condition --
whom obviously no kind of materialist paradise
can ever satisfy.

The first one I shall mention is by no means a
weakness. It is a deeply human and noble characteristic.
I am alluding to the fact that the American people
are anxious to have their country loved; they need
to be loved. (You will never find such a need in
an Englishman. As to Frenchmen, they are so sure
in advance that everybody loves them that they
don't feel any particular anxiety about the
matter. But they are very much shocked when they
realize it is not true.) Well, this desire to have
America loved is the mark of a soul which lies
open to the sense of human brotherhood; it plays
an important part, I think, in the general
psychology of this country.

I do not forget that the cultivated American --
perhaps because he feels a particular urge to cast
a critical eye in a national environment he
considers uncritical -- is as anxious to have
America criticized as to have her loved. As a
result, any writer who bitterly denounces the
vices of this country is listened to with special
care and sorrowful appreciation; though he hurts,
and is gently packed off to the tenebrae
exteriores where he belongs. And the writer who
admires and praises this country has the nice
qualities of a gratifying friend, to be sure, but
is considered softhearted. The love of Americans
for their country is not an indulgent, it is an
exacting and chastising love; they cannot tolerate
its defects. Frenchmen behave in the same way, yet
they carp at their fellow Frenchmen with fun,
either sarcastic or cheerful, whereas Americans
denigrate America with ethical melancholy.

Now, in the second place: I remember that,
speaking of his fellow Americans, especially of
American youth, a great friend of mine said to me
one day: "They have no roots." The worst
scoundrel in Europe has roots; there is some old
human legacy to which he can stick, for better or
for worse. Here there is, it seems to me, a
certain instability, or fleetingness, in the life
of individuals; one is less sure that "it will
last," that they will carry through, I don't say
with the job they are determined to do, I would
rather say with the inner purpose they have formed
as to the direction of their own personal life.

That is why, among the general features of
American psychology, and despite many exceptions,
of course, I think we can observe a certain
proneness to a peculiar sort of impatience, and,
as a result, a proneness also to quick
discouragement. Let me make my thought clearer. I
just said that the impatience in question is a
peculiar sort of impatience. American crowds (when
waiting for a train, for instance or
inconvenienced by any of the multiple regulations
of our modern life, or plagued by red tape) are
incomparably more patient than French crowds. Men
and women in this country confront suffering with
great courage, and often a strange Stoic
resignation. In emergencies they manifest
admirable endurance. But they are not patient with
life.

They are not patient with their own life, as a
rule. And they get disturbed and discouraged very
soon, if the work they have undertaken is slow to
succeed. The American artist, the American
painter, would like to have his work satisfy him
rapidly and give immediate results, whereas a
French painter, a Cézanne, a Rouault --
disregarded, spurned by all for perhaps thirty or
forty years -- remains bent on working with furious
patience. As a rule, I think, a young American
would be afraid that such an attitude marked only
presumptuous stubbornness. If he is not
recognized, he starts doubting himself. He thinks
he is a failure.

*

The third point I would like to mention is akin to
the second. It is a kind of inner insecurity --
masked, of course, by forced optimism. I don't
believe very much in that big, radiant optimism
which social etiquette obliges American faces to
display. It masks more often than not worry and
inner insecurity.

In actual fact, the great idea
is to do as if evil did not exist. There was
indeed, at one time, a real philosophy of the
negation of evil in this country. War has put an
end to it. American youth knows now that evil
exists, that death exists, that the devil exists.
This fact, at all events, does not diminish the
inner insecurity of which I am speaking. I deeply
respect this inner insecurity, inner discomfort,
repressed anxiety -- these things to which many
people are a prey. For they are proof that one
does not bluff oneself, that one is aware of the
awful magnitude and complexity of the problems in
which human life is entangled. I believe,
nevertheless, that in the last analysis they are
caused by a lack of sufficiently firm and
integrated intellectual certainties.

Be that as it may, the fact is that people here
need often to be intellectually reassured; to know
more unquestionably, either through better
established rational convictions, or through the
testimony of their fellow men, that they are
right, especially as regards their idealistic
incentives and their faith in the power of good
will and generosity. As a corollary, I would say
that the unjust European (and Asian) refusal to
recognize the good intentions of this country,
while trying to offer of the immense effort of
American good will any kind of cheap cynical
explanation, is of a nature to cause damage to the
American soul itself.

*

Finally, a fourth point relates to the fact that
Americans need, as it were, their natural
environment to be themselves. That is probably why
the behavior of Americans abroad is so different
from their behavior at home. I was able to observe
the fact in France and in Italy. My Parisian
friends had the same impression. Most of the
Americans they had known in this country did not
seem to be the same persons in Europe. When they
are abroad it seems that they feel unhappy, afraid
of meeting people, shy. And, as a result, they
tend to become arrogant. Where are their cordial,
genial, cheerful manners? They left them behind,
in the native climate of the big country. One is
led to think that each individual needs his home,
his natural environment so much that abroad he
feels estranged from himself.

Except for friendly relations with various colored
persons whom I highly esteem and appreciate, I
have not had an opportunity, in my own personal
experience, to confront the race question in
America. I know of it by hearsay -- a great deal of
hearsay indeed. This question, moreover, has
historical and sociological roots which make it
much too complex to be discussed in a few pages.
The following remarks are not a discussion of it,
but rather a few reflections apropos of it.

The most general fact concerning the race question
in America is the opposition which exists between
the mores and the law -- I mean to say, between
the feelings and behavior of large parts of the
white population, and the Federal law. Just as, at
the time of Lincoln, the Federal government
opposed slavery, to the point where the nation
became involved in a tragic civil war, so the
Federal law, in all matters which depend on it,
stands for the complete equality of all citizens,
without any sort of racial discrimination. And
thus, each time an open conflict between the mores
and the Federal law occurs, a kind of showdown
takes place.

Furthermore, it is relevant, it seems to me, to
distinguish between two categories of problems: on
the one hand those which have to do with civil
rights and legal segregation, and on the other
hand those which have to do with racial prejudice
in individual relations.

*

Segregation enforced by law, in its multifarious
forms pervading all aspects of social life, still
exists in Southern states, as a legacy of a social
structure which was based on slavery. It
corresponds not only to ingrained prejudices, but
also to ingrained customs and traditions to which
the daily activities of the white man and the
Negro have been adjusted for generations, and in
the framework of which better conditions for the
Negro population, and even progress toward a kind
of paternalist racial justice, were able to
develop -- on the assumed condition that Negroes
should continue being regarded, and regarding
themselves, as socially under age.

One must, no doubt, look with understanding and
sympathy at the difficulties with which many men
of good will, who are aware of their duties toward
colored people, but bound by their own local
traditions, are confronted in the South. It is
quite possible, moreover, that (just as was the
case before the Civil War, under the regime of
slavery) a number of Negro families may lead a
happier (more care-free) life under the
afore-mentioned circumstances than they will with
the responsibilities of adult age. Yet the
question is not a question of happiness, but of
human right. And it is inescapable.

I have no doubt that after a more or less long
interval, and despite the obstacles which certain
local elements may put in the way, legal
segregation will completely disappear, under the
double pressure of Federal legislation and the
decisions of the Supreme Court, and of the fight
conducted with such poise, dignity, and
self-devotion by the Negro population in Southern
states. At this point I would like to pay my
tribute of admiration to the colored people of
Montgomery, Alabama, and their spiritual leader,
Reverend Martin Luther King. They gave, in the
famous bus boycott of 1956, an example whose
historic importance may be considerable -- the most
striking example as yet seen in this country of a
possible use, in the Occident, of Gandhian methods
of non-violence.

*

As regards the second category of problems, those
which deal with racial prejudice in individual
relations, they are not limited to the Southland;
to one extent or another they are problems for the
whole nation. Miss Margaret Mead[7]
observes that the
American soldiers who fraternized with the Manus
had no anti-Negro feeling with respect to the
Negro race in general, to Negroes in the world,
but could very well nurture strong anti-Negro bias
with respect to their own colored people,
their own Negroes in America: for then it
is a question of tensions and competition within
the social group, and of the presence of a
supposedly alien element in the community. The
demons of the human heart are ready to feed on the
opportunity.

It is not only in the South, but also in any place
in the North where a large afflux of Negro
population takes place, especially highly
industrialized areas, that the popular prejudice
against colored people is rampant, composed as it
is of a mixture of fear, a contemptuous
superiority complex, and pleasure in humiliation,
and bullying others, with a latent possibility of
awakening here and there the worst instincts of
destruction and persecution; it was in the suburbs
of Chicago that, some years ago, particularly
hateful violence was used to prevent Negro
families from moving into sections inhabited by
white people. I don't speak of the restricted
hotels, restricted clubs, or restricted beaches,
and of the "correct" forms that racial prejudice
is taking in some parts of the educated or
well-to-do strata of the population (and not only
in relation to colored people, but in relation to
Jews, and sometimes to Irishmen as well . . . ).

*

These things are heart-rending, and lead now and
then to abominable excesses like lynching; this
country will probably take a much longer time to
put an end to them than to legal segregation. It
will put an end to them, though; because it is
determined to do so.

They are a plague on it, and they are incompatible
with its spirit, the sense of human fellowship
inherent in its people, and the very tenets in
which living together is founded here. It may be
remarked at this point that one may happen to hear
in certain circles, as an attempt to seek some
sort of moral alibi, blatant assertions about the
so-called inferiority of Negroes; yet nothing
resembling a racist doctrine exists in America. As
a rule, those who fall prey to racial prejudice do
not glory in it; they seem rather to feel
uncomfortable about it -- it's a kind of physical
condition with which they were born, they cannot
help feeling this way, that's all. At the bottom
of their hearts they realize that they can neither
explain nor justify their bias, and consequently
they invest it with the mysterious inevitability
of a fact of nature.

Another remark may be made, relating to the fact
that, whether one likes it or not, Negro citizens
are in actual existence an integral part of the
nation -- in wartime they are called, as any other
citizen is, to imperil their lives for it. In
becoming "integrated," they are only becoming
socially and culturally what they already are
existentially. "Negro people have made greater
cultural, educational and social progress in a
shorter time than has any other ethnic group in
recorded history."[8]
In proportion
as the number of educated Negroes occupying
positions of responsibility in the community
grows, the very progress toward complete
integration gains momentum automatically.

I just said that the American nation is determined
to make an end of anti-Negro prejudice with its
typically un-American retinue of human inequity,
humiliation and sanctioned distress. A sign of
this is the persistent urge, stronger than any
shuffling which may occur, which leads those
elements in the nation officially
representative of it -- namely the
legislative and executive branches of the Federal
government -- to take an always clearer and firmer
stand on the matter. Another sign is the
progressive awakening of public opinion, as well
as the determination and activity of those
self-organized groups of good citizens which are,
so to speak, the nerve system of the nation. Last,
and not least, no decisive victory over feelings
and passions rooted in the obscure recesses of
human nature can be achieved without profound
inner changes caused by the power of spiritual
energies. In this regard the role played by the
religious organizations is crucial, and so is
their responsibility. It is hard to condone the
timorous inertia that Catholic as well as
Protestant communities showed in the past with
respect to the requirements of the Gospel as far
as the Negro question was concerned. The very idea
of separate pews in churches, and racial
segregation at the communion table, is an
intolerable shock for the mind. Well, things are
changing fast. The uncompromising stand that
Archbishop Rummel has taken in Louisiana in behalf
of racial equality has unmistakable significance.
As a matter of fact, the Protestant and Catholic
clergy are now irrevocably engaged in the fight
against segregation and racial prejudice. Every
Catholic (and many a non-Catholic too) is indebted
to the work pursued in this field for more than
thirty years by Father John La Farge, and to the
steady effort through which his wisdom and courage
have illumined the public mind on the
matter.[9]
I have been acquainted with Father La Farge's
achievements for a long time, and I am one of his
many admirers. The following sentence from a book,
The Journal of a Southern Pastor, recently
published by another priest who shares in his
inspiration, has a universal bearing, as far as
Christian conscience is concerned: "We Catholics,"
the author writes, "must deliberately move forward
the complete integration of the Negro, welcoming
him as our brother in Christ and fellow son of God
in all the areas of our society."[10]

*

To sum up, what we witness when we consider in a
general way the race question in America, is the
spectacle of a nation which struggles doggedly
against itself, or, more accurately, against large
segments of its own people, against a certain
legacy of evil in its own mores, and against the
demons of the human heart -- in order to free itself
of abuses which are repellent to its own spirit,
and to raise its entire practical behavior to the
level of the tenets and principles in which it
believes and in the strength of which it was born.

The Negro question is a thorn in the flesh of the
American nation. The way in which the nation as
such, or the body politic, in the midst of all
kinds of local entanglements, reacts against this
wound and goes ahead seeking more or less
gropingly, but without respite, justice and
fairness for all, deserves respect and evinces,
within human infirmity, much human grandeur.

The sex question in America is surely no less
complicated than the race question. What might
elucidate it a little would be an extensive study
written by a team of experts, especially a psychologist,
an anthropologist, a sociologist, and a philosopher --
all of them guided, one would hope, by a genuinely
philosophical inspiration.

As for myself, I pretend in no way -- no more than
in the case of the race question -- to offer a complete
discussion of the matter in a short chapter. But the
problem exists. And it is not irrelevant to my my
impromptu reflections, I think, to point out, in a
conversational manner, a few things which I have had
an opportunity to observe about it.

The first remark I would like to make is that the
American approach to problems which will always
trouble and harass mankind proceeds, it seems to me,
from a desire to face things as they are courageously,
and to discover a way of straightening them
out, be it at the price of some more or less untoward
simplification. In the case of young people (in whose
eyes, for instance, the system of "going steady" enjoys
the dignity of a kind of social institution) this
approach appears to be less far-fetched, and more
integrated in the publicly recognized rules and customs
of social morality, than the European approach, but,
let me say, more naive too, and, on occasion, more
naively animal. The final result, as I see it, is not
much better than that of the European approach,
but not worse either, to be sure. Moreover, stating
that the average sexual morals in this country are
probably on a level with the average sexual morals
in Europe is not to pay a particularly great
compliment to either, or to human nature.

Yet it is in no way with the actual moral behavior
of people that my few reflections are concerned;
they have rather to do with their way of thinking.
From this point of view it might be said that a
growing preoccupation with sex is a quite general
phenomenon in our contemporary Western world, but
that in this country it takes particular forms --
less depraved (by reason of basic American good
will) than in certain sophisticated or literary
European circles, and also sillier (by reason of
the American confidence in facts and figures,
statistics, "science," and the universal power of
teaching). A quite peculiar sort of sex obsession,
or, in more accurate terms, of studious, earnest
and reverent concern for sex, is thus developing
in the mental habits of the educated citizen: as
if, once the yoke of Puritanism had been thrown
off, American good will had discovered the realm
of sex as a terra incognita of eminent and
fascinating dignity, from whose conscientious
exploration crucial discoveries in our own
self-knowledge, and wonderful improvements in our
human life should be expected.

Let us not speak of the foolish sexual
sentimentalism of advertising lure and imagery.
The most significant thing, to my mind, is the
impact, on the new concern for sex I have
mentioned, of the idea that everything, and
especially human relations, is on the one hand
matter for teaching and on the other hand matter
for shallow rational explanation and so-called
science -- where all that counts is that which can
be observed by the senses or by instruments,
measured, and figured out.

Hence a general tendency to think of all great
problems concerning human love in simple terms
of sex; and a tendency, in many a cultivated person,
to dismiss any idea of subjecting sexual life to
supra-biological and supra-sociological ethical standards
as a product either of religious prejudice or of a
prudish or puritanical cast of mind. At the same
time one can witness the development of a sort of
religious reverence for the "facts of life" which is,
in my opinion, awfully stultifying. And instead of
the genuine sex education (integrated in a comprehensive
knowledge of the whole human fabric) which
modern man needs very badly indeed, one can also
witness the preaching of a so-called sex education
in which cheap popularized science commingles
with soap-opera sentimentality and a most artlessly
serious-minded quest for the good. Competent doctors,
in a tepidly benevolent, cautious and paternal
style, uncover to attentive fathers and mothers of
families the mechanisms of sexual pleasure. And the
school system has classes in which respectable matrons
teach young ladies the best feminine techniques
through which male desires can be both stimulated
and kept under control, in order that these pupils,
naturally innocent and bookishly instructed, surprisingly
bold and surprisingly calculating at the
same time, may catch and keep a boy and make a
happy marriage.

With respect to the common consciousness of the
country these things are more conspicuous than
really typical. The fact remains that it is a curious
spectacle to see so many people either teaching or
learning, through biology and psychology, how to be
happy in sexual life, plus a lot of items which, as a
rule, and since the beginning of things, nature has
had its own ready ways of making known to human
beings free of Puritan or anti-Puritan complexes.

*

This chapter and the preceding one were not
comprised in my original plan, because my main
purpose was only to point out what I love in this
country. Why did I include them? -- For two reasons;
first, by reason of you, dear reader,
Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère,
and of the mental habits of the public: if I did not
speak of the disturbing aspects of the American
scene -- even assuming they were extraneous to my
subject -- I would appear to be concealing them on
purpose, or be considered still more stupid and
naive than I am.

The second reason is better: in reality the aspects
in question are not extraneous to my subject. If we
love a person or a country, it is only by looking at
those things which carry into him or it the mark of
the misery of human nature, and at the way in which
he or it confronts them, that our own awareness of
the reasons for our love is made complete. Only in
the Kingdom of God has the devil no part. In the
world, and in every nation of the world, he has his
part. The question, for a given nation, is whether
it likes or dislikes the fact, and whether it strives to
turn evil to acconnt or to get clear of it.

It is surely not for what I do not love in her that
I love America. But in the very violence with which,
far from trying to hide them, she lays bare her own
evils, or the kind of avowal or open display she makes
of them and in the nerve and courage with which
she struggles against them once she has become
conscious of their malignancy -- there is a deeply and
genuinely human element which causes me to love
her still more.

As regards the subject of the present chapter, and
that silly infatuation with the idea of sex to which
this country's misguided good will is now giving
way, the American people are still in the first of the
two stages of which I just spoke, the stage of open
avowal. The second stage, the stage of effort and
struggle toward recovery, is sure to come about.
When psychologists and psychiatrists who have a
responsibility of their own for the infatuation in
question, are made aware by statistics, and even
perhaps a bit of common sense, of its destructive
after-effects on the mental health of the nation, they
will be among the first to crusade against it.

When I think of American kindness, I remember not
only the courtesy and generosity with which our
American friends welcomed our small flock (my wife,
her sister, and myself) in New York and tried to
console us with their affection during the terrible
months of the downfall of France, but also the sort
of touching anonymous kindness which was shown us
at every turn by unknown people at the same epoch:
taxi drivers who said to us as we left the car,
"Vive la France"; or the hawker who refused to let
us pay for a bunch of flowers because we were
French; or the Negro in charge of the elevator at
the hotel who carefully concealed in his pocket the
newspaper each time (that is, almost every day) the
headlines announced a defeat of the French Army.
These are small things, but when one is unhappy one
is strangely comforted by such little things, which
we never failed to meet in the streets of New York
during that time.

*

Now I come to some more definite reflections.
The first remark I would like to submit is that
there exists, in a general way, two opposite scales
of values, in Europe and in this country.
The supreme value in the opinion of the European,
especially the French, people, is, I think,
intelligence -- intelligence in contradistinction
to goodness. If it is a question of the inner
disposition of souls, I have no doubt that there is
as much goodness in European people as in American
people. There were, and there are, in Europe,
saints who put divine love and love for the
neighbor above all else. And if the French like to
make a show of what is less good in them, it is
in order to push the bad things outside, and thus
to hide and shelter the good things inside which
are their real treasure.

Yet I am speaking of a quite different thing: I am
speaking of the accepted scale of values that
people have in their minds and use in the
conversation of ordinary life as well as in their
external social behavior.

And I would say that in Europe, especially in
France, "to be good" is synonymous with being
naive, green, something of a simpleton. Wickedness,
maliciousness -- appears to be a condition required
for intelligence. So it happens that when you
return from this country to Europe, your first
impression is that you are entering a wasp's nest.
You are stung on all sides. (I remember a letter of
an American residing in Paris, who wrote to a
friend of his: "At last I am really accepted in the
country, and treated like a Frenchman: today I was
abused by my concierge, abused by a policeman,
abused by the post office employees, and berated by
two art critics.")

Now, there is some advantage in this cast of mind.
It entails strong intellectual competition; the law
of the survival of the fittest plays a not
negligible part in European culture. And there is
even some truth involved -- for it is true that the
intellectual virtues and the human virtues do not
keep pace with one another. But the mistake
consists in believing that everyone is an
intellectual genius and has all the rights to
maliciousness and aggressiveness involved.

If we turn now to the scale of values used in this
country, it is just the opposite. The supreme value
in the American scale of values is goodness; human
reliability, good will, devotion, helpfulness.
Hence, that American kindness which is so striking
a feature to foreign visitors. Americans are ready
to help, and happy to help. They are on equal terms
of comradeship with everybody. And why? Simply
because everybody is a human being. A fellow man.
That's enough for him to be supposed worthy of
assistance and sympathy -- sometimes of exceedingly
thoughtful and generous attention. When you arrive
in this country you experience in this connection a
strange unforgettable sense of relief. You breathe
more easily. And for all that, intelligence is not
victimized.

I mentioned earlier the Manus of New Guinea. I
would like to glance once again at this people who
in twenty-five years jumped from the primitive to
the civilized age, and at the impact that the
passage of a million Americans through their island
during the Second World War had on this
anthropological phenomenon. Let us quote a few
passages from the celebrated anthropologist Magaret
Mead, in her book New Lives for Old[11]:
"There is no reason to believe
that the Americans, the some million Americans, who
went through Manus represented in any way a
specially selected, better mannered, or more
idealistic section of the United States than any
other such cross-section. Yet the Manus experienced
them as a people whose relationships to each other
were casteless and classless, where each man
treated each other man as a human being."[12]

"The Americans treated us like individuals, like
brothers," they said to the author.[13]

"The Americans believe in having work done by
machines so that men can live to old age instead of
dying worn out while they are still young."[14]

"As the Manus report it today, the Americans
believed that every human being's life and health
was of inestimable value, something for which no
amount of property, time, and effort was too much
to sacrifice . . . 'From the Americans we learned
that human beings are irreplaceable and
unexpendable, while all material things are
replaceable and so expendable.'"[15]

"'From the Americans we learned that it is only
human beings that are important.'"[16]

Shall we conclude that Manus are more perspicacious
than Europeans with their slogans about American
materialism? Let us say, rather, that while
remaining on their island, they had the unique
opportunity of seeing Americans at home. The
million Americans who passed through Manus were not
there Americans abroad; they had America with them,
that kind of roving American world which was the
American army.

*

A particular result of the scale of values I
mentioned above is that, as I said, we find here a
general kindness, kindness to everyone, the
extension of which is, so to speak, indefinite. But
close friendship, with all the hardships and
quarrels, and the human communion it involves,
seems perhaps to have, as a result, a little less
opportunity to develop. (Moreover, conversation
must be pretty difficult if it is true that in this
country, as a good lady said to my wife, "it is
becoming to speak neither of the body, nor of the
soul.") So it is that in the midst of general
kindness and the busiest social life, it is not
rare to find in individuals a feeling of loneliness:
perhaps because there is a sort of opposition
between openness to all and that close world which
is the world of friendship.

That is a point I only submit. I don't know, but it
seems to me that there is something there.

*

The last point I would like to make in this chapter
is about mutual toleration and the sense of
fellowship. This sense is tragically thwarted by
prejudice when it comes to the race question. The
fact remains, however, that racial prejudice, as I
previously remarked, is incompatible with the very
tenets of the American way of life and the deepest
demands of the American psyche, and that, as a
result, this country has set itself to eradicate it.
As to intellectual intolerance, intolerance with
respect to the philosophical or religious creeds of
co-citizens, it is no less destructive of the very
tenets of American life; and the American
conscience has triumphed over it. Speaking of New
England culture in the days of the Puritans, Paul
Elmer More stated that this culture passed through
three successive stages: religious intolerance,
imaginative isolation, nervous impotence. These are
things of the past. The danger inherent in the
instincts of human nature will always exist, to be
sure. The Klan exists, with its cross-burnings. Yet
despite any tension, or sporadic outburst of fear
or anger, the American public mind, as well as
American law, has irrevocably passed sentence on
the use of violence, coercion, slander, or menace
against any dissenter. Mutual toleration is an
absolute necessity here, as a result of the very
fact that the American community is made up of
people from completely different national, social,
and religious stocks. Without mutual tolerance,
everybody would be at each other's throat.
And that which was thus made obligatory by
historical necessity represents in itself, at the
same time, an invaluable gain for civilization:
people committed to live together in mutual respect
and tolerance. America is the only country in the
world where the vital importance of the sense of
human fellowship is recognized in such a basic
manner by the nation as a whole.

*

Let me add that even so great an achievement could
sometimes be understood in the wrong way. Kindness
is not all. As I put it a moment ago, intelligence
is not victimized here by goodness and the sense of
human fellowship. It might be, though. And in one
particular case I think it is, namely in the case
of high school education, where remarkably
intelligent and devoted teachers seem to make
kindness prevalent to such a point that the great
thing is to have everybody equally happy and
successful, and to train happy boys and girls in
any talent of their own and any activity of social
life -- no matter how great the cost to genuine
general culture and the fundamentals of integrated
knowledge.

Coming now to more general considerations, I would
like to observe that, as a result of a stronger
community spirit, the conditions of intellectual
life in this country differ somewhat from those in
Europe. What I mean is that both organized
intellectual effort and the general, collective
intellectual work in the nation, the tilling of the
soil for future intellectual harvests, and the
general advance of research have much better
possibilities here than in Europe. It is a fact
that in more and more fields it has become
imperative for scholars and the erudite in general
as well as for scientists to acquaint themselves
with what is going on in this country. But when it
comes to the creative work of which a few are
capable, and which demands solitary and ferocious
obstinacy (and all the more dedication as nobody
knows whether the result will be worth the pains),
the conditions are, I would say, relatively less
favorable: they involve a greater dislike for
anything that entails a risk of separating the
individual from the community.

I am thinking in particular of that kind of fear of
outshining others which can sometimes be observed
in academic circles. Many an American professor
seems to be anxious not to be more brilliant or more
original than the average member of the teaching
community. After all, is not genius always harmful
to mutual tolerance and a good state of affairs in
the community, and is not mediocrity of good
standing preferable to any occasion for jealousy,
strife and rivalry?

Well, it is always enjoyable to have some fun at
the expense of excessive reverence for community
feelings. The fact remains that so far as
intellectual life is concerned (this is the only
perspective in which I am considering things at the
present moment), the excessive reverence I just
mentioned is peculiar to the academic world and
even to its less remarkable elements. In more
general terms let us say that between American
intellectual life and European intellectual life
there is a sort of dissymmetry, the one having
often its weaker points with respect to qualities
in which the other has its stronger ones, and
conversely; but the one as a whole is at a level
with the other as a whole. Moreover, American
intellectual life, being in full growth, is at each
moment able to develop unexpected potentialities.
Today the emphasis is on science. In a few decades
it may also be on the humanities or philosophy. In
the realm of creative imagination, American
novelists, poets, and critics are among those to
whom modern literature owes its greatest
achievements and most delicately penetrating
investigations.

I do not forget, naturally, that field in which I
have an interest of my own, the field of
philosophy. Mortimer Adler was right in pointing
out, in a recent article,[17] that the names of
Charles Sanders Peirce, Josiah Royce, William
James, and John Dewey give clear proof of the fact
that in the period of general growth which took
place after the Civil War, American philosophers
came to deserve the appreciation due to great
intellectual personalities. Their work (which,
whatever conflicting points of view and sharp
oppositions it may involve, has in common, as I see
it, a general concern for objectivity, and a
thoughtful attention to every aspect of existence)
shows how absurd is the notion, still accepted by
many people who are ignorant of this country, that
the American mind has a congenital aversion for
abstract ideas, and for sustained and disinterested
reflection.

This work, no doubt, still largely depends on the
various intellectual currents which were born
abroad, especially in Europe; it is nonetheless
genuinely creative. For it causes a body of
philosophical material of considerable extent to be
tried, tested, revised and recast against the
background of the American moral and cultural
situation, and worked out into original
doctrines.[18] So it is that now, as Herbert
Schneider puts it,[19] a completely new chapter in
American philosophy is being written by the present
generation. It is, I would add, no small
achievement to have here a Metaphysical
Society and a Review of Metaphysics
which have taken a stand against all forms of
positivism and against the concept that science is
the only kind of valid knowledge human reason is
capable of. "That America has come into its own
philosophically seems undeniable," Mortimer Adler
rightly stated. "Where we fall short, as compared
with the older philosophical countries of Europe,
is in public interest and participation and in
further penetration of philosophy into the
intellectual and political life of the nation. But
this too will doubtless come in time."

*

For the time being there is indeed in American ways
-- I would like to mention it parenthetically -- a
particular point which offers little cause for
elation, namely the attitude of public opinion
toward intellectuals, especially toward artists.
In France artists are kings; everybody is
interested in their doings and in the opinion of a
great novelist or a great painter on national
affairs. Here, on the contrary, their opinions
carry less weight than that of prominent
businessmen; furthermore, and this is more serious,
they seem to arouse some suspicion, and communion
between the beholder and the artist is lacking in
the very place where it should exist, namely, in
that area which, though indeed larger than the
small group of expert connoisseurs, is narrower
than the general public, and which may be called
the enlightened public. As to the connoisseurs,
their fondness for art and their taste are
especially remarkable here (one has only to think
of the incomparable treasures in modern painting
which have been brought to this country by the
intelligent choice of private collectors). The
general public has as vulgar a taste here as
everywhere, though there is in them an eagerness to
understand which could produce astonishing results
if it were cultivated. But what about the
enlightened public, with which I am particularly
concerned? What the enlightened public expects from
the artist is, doubtless, some kind of genuine
intellectual enjoyment, and in general they are
pretty good judges. But I am afraid they are no
more interested in the inner creative effort of a
painter or a writer than, I would say, in that of
the cook who prepares food for them in restaurants.
They enjoy the work as they enjoy the food, but the
quest and discoveries of the artist in the proper
field of art and poetry, his creative agony, stirs
almost no one, I believe, outside the closed world
of the artists and connoisseurs themselves.

*

To close this parenthesis, and come back to my
subject, there is, I would observe, a possible
mistake on the requirements of mutual toleration
which, in my opinion, it is important to be aware
of.

One happens sometimes to meet people who think that
a primary condition of tolerance and peaceful
co-existence is not to believe in any truth or not
to adhere firmly to any assertion as unshakeably
true in itself. May I say that these people are, in
fact, the most intolerant people, for if perchance
they were to believe in something as unshakeably
true, they would feel compelled by the same stroke
to impose by force and coercion their own belief on
their fellow men. The only remedy they have found
for their abiding tendency to fanaticism is to cut
themselves off from truth. As a result, they insist
that whoever knows or claims to know truth or
justice simply cannot be a good citizen "because
he cannot and is not expected to admit the
possibility of a view different from his own, the
true view."

Well, if it were true that whoever knows or claims
to know truth or justice cannot admit the
possibility of a view different from his own, and
is bound to impose his true view on other people by
violence, the rational animal would be the most
dangerous of beasts. In reality, it is through
rational means, that is, through persuasion, not
coercion, that man is bound by his very nature to
try to induce others to share in what he knows or
claims to know as true and just. Be it a question
of science, metaphysics, or religion, the man who
says "What is truth?", as Pilate did, is not a
tolerant man, but a betrayer of the human race.
There is, in other words, real and genuine
tolerance only when a man is firmly and absolutely
convinced of a truth, or of what he holds to be a
truth, and when, at the same time, he recognizes
the right of those who deny this truth to exist,
and to contradict him, and to speak their own mind,
not because they are free from truth but because
they seek truth in their own way, and because he
respects in them human nature and human dignity,
and those very resources and living springs of the
intellect and of conscience which make them
potentially capable of attaining the truth he
loves, if some day they happen to see it.

The views I have just criticized about the "what is
truth?" supposedly required by mutual toleration
are not specifically American -- it was Kelsen who
made a system of them. Moreover, when you hear,
them expressed -- not infrequently, I would say --
in this country, they are much more an easy-going
way of speaking than an expression of serious views
to be put into practice. In actual fact what people
think is rather that a kind of humility always
keeps pace with the spirit of tolerance. And this
is perfectly true.

I don't believe, nevertheless, that it is without
utility explicitly to realize that doubt and
intellectual timidity are not a prerequisite for
mutual toleration; and that it is truth, not
ignorance, which makes us humble, and gives us the
sense of what remains unknown in our very
knowledge. In one sense there is wisdom in
appealing to our ignorance, if we mean the
ignorance of those who know, not the ignorance of
those who are in the dark.